A Shortcoming
by Dances With Pandas
Summary: Walter 'Street Beat' Munroe has finally gotten hold of a gruesome police report he's been looking for. Despite the food riots in DC and the war up north can a newspaper article really make things any worse? Only the future will tell.


Disclaimer: I own nothing regarding Fallout 3. The following is based off Bethsoft's game and is submitted for non-profit and entertainment value.

A Shortcoming

Walter 'Street Beat' Munroe stared hard at the police file in front of him. Another victim had been found. That was the third this month. It had been a young woman this time. The signature knife-wounds were always low. As he started his article for the Capitol Post he tried to make sense of the file but he had come up short.

Short like the peppy skirt she wore out at the weekend when she'd gone on that date with the ruggedly handsome Vaultec engineer that her best friend and fellow war widow Amber had set her up with. She'd been so unlucky in love since her husband, Kirk, had died tragically in combat against the Chinese six months before. She was still grieving but over brunch and some fabulous champagne at Amber's house. All of her friends agreed it was time to get back out there.

Out there. Where the victims lay. She took a swig of the bottle she kept in her nurses station desk for when things like this happened. No matter how hard you thought you were, it was always difficult to cope when you heard about some innocent whose insides had been spread across the sidewalk. Germantown's first serial killer had struck again. The MO had been the same. The victims were usually female and had been stabbed low with a kitchen knife. Even more unsettling was the victim was usually found in a public place. One of the autopsies had been done at her hospital. She overheard the doctors talking about how the killer had taken his time. How could a murderer commit such a henious crime in a public place?

She had to snap out of it though she was in a rush. She had that hair appointment later on. Lord did she need it. She couldn't go out in public with split ends like that. What would Kirk have thought? She wished she could ask him but he was dead in Alaska somewhere. Luckily, before he died, he'd written her a short poem for every day of the coming year and the latest spoke to her. _'Amy with her beautiful hair____,__ you're as cute as a kitty, to be away from you I can not bear, because you are so pretty!'._ It was his artistic, dyslexic soul she loved most. The thought of him made her so sad until she could do nothing more than curl up on the couch with a glass of Shiraz and smoke roll-ups. When police chief Joseph Field came by to explain the victim she had heard about that morning had been her best friend Amber she couldn't contain her sadness. She wept.

Wept like Amber's nine year old son, who had been clutching at the lacerated remains of his mother when she was found. Uniformed cops tried to be understanding and sensitive but eventually they had to drag him off his mother's body. Cops who should have kept the serial killer away from her in the first place. He couldn't bear being away from his mother. She couldn't bear their incompetence. 'Jumped up security guards' she thought as she threw her roll-up away and watched it extinguish in the rain, just like the lives of all the victims. She thought of Amber's poor son, amazingly he had settled to sleep in her spare room. She had been honoured to be his God-mother but she couldn't ask herself if she was ready to be responsible for a child.

How could she cope with a child now, now that she was so alone? She was going to have to bring him up by herself or with Jim, the Vaultec engineer's help. She wasn't sure if he was so smitten by the smile that was always on her lips for him. She would have to talk to him though. Later on , he was walking her home from the hospital so she could tell him her new responsibilities then.

Three months later they went to watch a holo-vid together, simple things like this turned into the social event of the year when you were responsible for a child. She had taken Amber's son to the playground every day and that seemed to be going well for him. The sitter was taking care of him for a couple of extra hours and she and Jim had decided to watch a movie. A news reel about the liberation of Anchorage came on and she felt out of place, she starred at her feet while images of brave soldiers ripping Chinese flags down from flag poles played to the audience. Jim, the Vaultec engineer, put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. They gazed at each other for the longest time. After, he had walked her home she shared an illicit kiss with him on her doorstep. It was so sensual that immediately afterwards she'd called another nurse, Sally-Anne, and they'd spoken on the phone for an hour, giggling at the end of the call she thought for the first time things were looking up.

It was by her uniform the police identified her, the skirt pointed to a hospital on the north side of town. How a single woman had come to be murdered in a children's playground had baffled the police for a while but by the time they had put their gruesome conclusions together the killer had already fled.

Walter 'Street Beat' Munroe finished his first article about The Pint Sized-Slasher.


End file.
